


things we forgot, we try to remember

by norgbelulah



Category: Justified
Genre: Episode Tag, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-29
Updated: 2012-02-29
Packaged: 2017-10-31 21:41:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/348638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/pseuds/norgbelulah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raylan's maybe feeling lonely. Ava and Boyd are feeling adventurous.</p>
<p>I couldn't resist writing this after [spoilers for 3.06 ahead] Ava and Raylan and Raylan and Boyd interchangeably shared screen time in this episode. And, now that Raylan's not *exactly* tied down. *g*</p>
            </blockquote>





	things we forgot, we try to remember

Raylan goes to the bar.

He doesn’t think about why or what for.

After he leaves Helen’s, having just finished signing some things and talking to Tom again as they close up the crime scene, Raylan barely registers that his hands and feet are driving him to the place until he’s pulling in to its dirt lot.

He exists his car with thoughts that are carefully blank. He goes inside, like he takes such a walk every damn day, sits at the bar, and stares down Johnny Crowder.

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad to see Johnny peeking up from behind the bar, sitting low in his wheelchair. Raylan hates to see shit like that, so he doesn’t laugh.

“Can I help you?” Johnny asks, his voice tense.

Raylan smiles, patently ignoring all awkwardness. “I would like a drink. Jim Beam on the rocks, I’m thinkin’.”

When Johnny makes no move for a glass, Raylan says, “You do still sell that shit to people here, right?”

Johnny makes to say something, but closes his mouth with an audible click of teeth, then rolls his way down the floor and picks up the bottle of Jimmy. He fixes the drink in silence, eyes shooting back up to glare at Raylan every so often, before he slides the three-fingers-full glass down the bar, where Raylan catches it neatly.

“Much obliged,” he says, raising the bourbon, and takes a drink.

“Two-fifty for it,” Johnny snaps. Raylan lays his money on the bar, careful to put it within the man’s reach.

It’s not thirty seconds later, he hears the high beeping sounds of someone punching numbers into a cell phone.

Raylan smirks.

 

“Raylan’s here,” Johnny says over the line.

Boyd smiles as he slips on his shoes. “I was on my way over anyway,” he tells his cousin. “Did he say what he wants?”

Boyd is genuinely curious. He hasn’t heard of anything particular occurring in Harlan since the incident at Helen’s and then with the oxy trailer. Raylan was involved in both those events, so he shouldn’t need to shake Boyd down for information.

“He’s just drinkin’ at the bar. Didn’t even ask for you. So, I dunno. You want me to ask?”

“No, don’t bother. I’ll find out,” Boyd replies as he pulls on his coat. He leaves a note for Ava on the table.

Raylan is indeed sitting at the bar when Boyd arrives. He doesn’t turn as Boyd comes through the door, though he must know it’s opened by the wretched creaking and clanging sound it makes as it closes behind him.

Johnny looks at Boyd from the doorway to the back, eyes him hard like he thinks something’s about to go down.

Boyd’s not so sure.

He shakes his head at Johnny, though some of the other patrons have noticed, and seem to be collecting themselves and their respective shit up. Boyd doesn’t mind. They were all going to go home for dinner soon enough and he doesn’t really need the paltry monthly profit the establishment only occasionally earns.

Boyd removes his jacket, throws it casually on the coat rack at the door, and makes his way over to the bar.

Raylan barely looks as Boyd sits down on the stool directly next to him. He takes a sip of his drink. It’s nearly gone, just a pile of ice shot through with a sheen of brown liquid.

“Can I get you another?” Boyd asks, their customary greeting not seeming quite right at this juncture.

Raylan drains the glass, tossing it back hard, shaking the last drops into his open mouth. He looks at Boyd with clear eyes that say nothing in particular. “Please do.”

Boyd stands on the rungs at the bottom of his stool and leans over the bar, reaching down for another glass and the bottle of Jimmy that his cousin left out. He looks up at Johnny after he pours out the drinks, enough to cover Raylan’s dwindling ice and two fingers for himself.

“You can go ahead and go, Johnny. No pressing business today, I think. Raylan and I, we’re just gonna do some drinkin’,” he says.

Raylan closes his eyes as he takes another sip. Johnny makes a bunch of noise on his way out.

“Well, it looks like you scared everyone else outta here, Raylan,” Boyd observes, pressing his back against the bar and turning his head to his friend, before he takes a sip.

“I’m thinkin’ Johnny did with his death glare,” Raylan says, mouth quirking towards a smile. He leans his elbows up on the bar, crossing his arms in front of his drink. “I was just sittin’ here.”

“You have to admit, Raylan, this ain’t your usual hangout. This kind of behavior, it’ll put a man with a suspicious mind, sadly a man like my cousin Johnny, on his guard. Makes for a tense atmosphere.” The juke box is playing something low and bluesy under Boyd’s words and it feels right when Raylan looks over at him.

“Plus, he don’t like me.” Raylan tilts his head and smiles for real. “Never has.”

“Your stats were always better than his.” Boyd chuckles and takes another drink, a long one.

Raylan thinks sometimes he likes talking to Boyd when he’s not doing or saying some unbelievable shit. Like now, when Boyd is smiling at him, leaning back against the bar like he and Raylan sit and drink this way all the time.

He looks around the place, trying to remember the last time he set foot inside it back when it was still Johnny Crowder Sr.’s place and Boyd and he would spend five dollars each, playing ACDC on the juke box all night.

“Times were, Boyd, you and I’d be here two, three nights out of any given week,” Raylan says into his glass.

Boyd shows Raylan his teeth again, a big, wide grin, full of fond memories, stretched out by drinking his first much too fast. His eyes crinkle up, tighter than they used to when they were young and Raylan realizes how little he’s seen Boyd smile, truly and without any bitterness or guile, since his return to Kentucky.

“And at least three or four others out at Audrey’s,” Boyd replies, raising his empty glass. He turns his whole body towards Raylan as he pours another round for himself, looking inquiringly at Raylan’s own glass, just half-gone.

“I’ll wait,” Raylan says with a small smile.

Boyd likes the look in Raylan’s eyes, just now. It reminds him of how he used to look at Boyd, before things got clouded up by years apart and inked swastikas and bags of oxy.

“Think I forgot?” Boyd asks. “About those times?”

He’s glad Raylan’s eyes don’t waver from his as he answers, “No, I think I did.”

Boyd gives Raylan a grin that looks like he’s hiding a secret, and a sweet one at that, something that’s sure to come out in time.

They’re sitting there grinning at each other when Ava walks in.

 

Boyd’s note, scrawled fast and left sideways on the kitchen table said, Raylan’s at Johnny’s. Come when you can.

Ava had sighed, not unhappily, as she read it and put her coat back on, grabbing for her bag just inside the door.

With Raylan Givens, she thinks as she watches Boyd and him smiling like there had never been any bad feelings between them, it’s always some kind of trouble, the kind you don’t want, or the kind you really do.

Ava hopes today, she’s going to get something she’s been wanting for a while now.

They both watch her, smiling still, as she walks around to the other side of the bar. She quirks an eyebrow at them and asks, “You boys scare everyone else out of here?”

Raylan snorts and Boyd replies, “He’s insisting it was Johnny.”

Ava laughs. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all.” Raylan echoes the sound and Boyd tries to look slightly affronted. Ava picks up the three-quarters empty bottle of Jimmy sitting next to her man’s elbow and gives him the hard edge of her eye for a few seconds.

Raylan points his finger at her, so she turns it on him too, as he says, “It was quarter gone at least when Johnny poured my first one. We ain’t been here that long, Ava.”

“I believe you,” she says, like she really doesn’t and gets herself a generous amount of ice in a glass before she pours her own.

Raylan rolls his eyes. “Oh, you’ll believe Boyd right away about Johnny, then go an’ hand me all your sarcasm.”

Boyd’s just watching them, something bright and funny in his eyes. Ava knows he’s thinking about what she told him, just a few nights before, after she came back from Audrey’s and the scene outside Ellen Mae’s trailer.

“Come on, Raylan,” she plays, walking back around the bar, sliding her free hand across the smooth wood. “I know you prefer it when your women aren’t too nice to you. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

Raylan holds himself very still for a moment, then he glances at Boyd, who doesn’t seem to have noticed the fairly obvious flirtation in which Ava is engaging. He remembers this look in Ava’s eye, the one full of heat and want. She was never a woman who’d hide her desires.

He’s about to say something stupid, something not funny to break this little mood she’s pushed them into, when Boyd finally speaks. “What happened, Raylan?”

Raylan doesn’t turn to Boyd at the sound of his voice. He’s still very much frozen where he is, as if he’s thinking Boyd might finally be pushed to anger if he makes any kind of movement. He’s looking at Ava, who’s eyes are curious and dark, an interesting combination Boyd’s not sure he’s ever seen on her face. She’s a patient girl, is his woman, and Boyd thinks she’s playing this just right.

“Mmm, sorry?” Raylan asks.

“You wouldn’t be here if you had any other place to be, darlin’,” Ava says gently. “How long ago did she leave you?”

Raylan closes his eyes. “She left the day Mags died. I didn’t know.” Ava notices he doesn’t say the day he was shot, or the day she was. Boyd wonders why he didn’t just give the day or the month, or the time elapsed, they all would have known. “Came back, we tried... or, I guess she did. Since I didn’t know. Left again three days ago. She ain’t comin’ back.”

Ava has no pity for him. She knows this pain, or something of its kind, knows he realizes he was the one who gave it to her. “Okay,” she says and he still hasn’t moved.

Raylan’s back goes straighter, like it always has when he feels the sting of words instead of hands.

Raylan is saying, “It’s really no--”

Boyd leans forward, putting his mouth right up against Raylan’s ear and pitching his voice real low. “Stop talkin’,” he tells him and he does.

Ava smiles again, liking how wide Raylan’s eyes are and the quiet intensity of Boyd’s. She sets down her glass.

Boyd slides his hand, smooth and sure, on Raylan’s shoulder. His muscles are tense. He can’t imagine relaxing. “Listen,” Boyd says.

Boyd speaks as Ava moves up on Raylan, her hands slow and smooth on his arms, pulling herself closer, between his legs, bracing up against the bar stool. Boyd says, “You know, Raylan, Ava told me the most interesting thing, just the other night while we were lyin’ together.”

Raylan takes a deep breath, Boyd can feel it under his hand, in the motion of the air between them. He keeps on. “I had my hands on her, one just on her hip, pullin’ her close to me,” Ava’s hand falls to Raylan’s belt at his hip, just next to his sidearm. She walks herself up on his leg, perching there, like a bird. “And the other, I had on her tit.” Ava slides her other fingers, curling just so, across Raylan’s chest. She’s breathing deep, keeping pace with Raylan.

“Ava said to me, as I was holding her this way, she said,” Boyd flicks his eyes to her and she says, “I can’t get Raylan and his boots and his damn avenging angel’s face out of my head, Boyd.”

“Now, I think, Raylan,” Boyd says, and Raylan can hear the smile edging into his voice, recognizing it after so long, from times they would laugh and joke in the mine, talking to each other’s back or to the wall. It’s a subtle difference, one Raylan hasn’t picked up on in a while. “I think most men in my position might have reacted with anger, violence even.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t,” Raylan interjects, just to be contrary, and Boyd’s fingers dig into his shoulder. Ava pushes herself further up on him, closer, and Raylan breathes the air she blows on him. Their noses brush like she’s going to kiss him, but she holds herself away when he tries to close the space between them.

He can’t remember when his hands found the high, soft skin of her thighs, wound up in the flowing folds on her hiked-up dress. He barely hears Boyd tell him to listen again, because he’s thinking about how hard he is, and how it’s Boyd’s breath in his ear, Boyd’s low words speaking straight to him, just as much as it’s Ava making him this way.

Boyd says, “No, Raylan, I didn’t. I listened to her, when she told me what you did at Ellen Mae’s trailer. How you pushed your coat behind that badge like Wyatt fuckin’ Earp, and how Delroy’s face lost all it’s color and his eyes got all small and scared.” Boyd puts his hand on Raylan’s thigh, just above where Ava’s pussy is resting, he slides his hand up, feeling how hot and hard Raylan is in his jeans. He can’t believe how intensely he wants this, seeing as he’d never considered such a thing before Ava brought Raylan’s name to their bed.

Boyd remembers the tight, strange sensation he felt in his chest when Ava started talking about Raylan, fear and excitement in her eyes, her lips moving, words spilling out like she couldn’t stop them coming. He’d been as still as Raylan had been just moment before, frozen by surprise, until that feeling compounded, pulling and expanding to something not just tight, but hot, blazingly so, and enormous.

He tries to put all that into his voice as he continues, “I listened to her say she had never seen anything as goddamn sexy as your boot on that scum’s chest, the barrel of your pistol clenched in your hand. And, Raylan, I fucked her that whole time she was talkin’, because I can’t think of anything I’d rather see more, ‘cept you and her sittin’ there together like you are right now.”

He told Ava after, that he’d never loved her more.

Raylan lets those words rest between them for a half a beat that feels something like an hour. He lets them sink in, but not so deep they can inspire hesitation.

He twists a little in Ava’s grasp, just far enough to put his hands up on either side of Boyd’s face, and drags their lips together, pulling Boyd into a rough, searing kiss. It’s the kind he used to give Ava, when he was riding high on doing something he knew was wrong, something he knew could blow up in his face.

Sometimes, Raylan likes letting his momentum get the better of him. He likes the sensation of not bothering to break a fall or block a blow.

He’s not thinking of the fallout as he groans into Boyd’s tongue sliding inside his mouth, with Ava’s hand reaching for his belt. He’s thinking about how badly he’s missed Ava’s clever fingers, how he didn’t know he could miss Boyd’s lips when he’d never felt them before.

Ava’s watching them, pushing herself up higher on Raylan’s knee, their eyes are closed, Raylan’s tight with brows creased, Boyd’s smooth and calm. She’s never seen them kiss like this before, not just each other, anyone. She always keeps her eyes closed.

They’re all so close together and the air between them is pulsing with heat, strung tight with tension.

Ava’s fingers curl around Raylan’s waistband, searching for his belt, but she pauses, even as they’re still kissing and says, “Hold on, boys.”

They turn to look at her, pupils blown wide, confusion and sex in their gazes. Boyd is licking his lips and Ava has to force out the words, “We should move.”

“What?” Raylan says. He can’t think of a single reason why.

Ava smiles and Boyd wants to touch her, but his hands are tangled up in Raylan. “We gotta move from this bar stool, darlin’, ‘cause I want you to fuck me without fallin’ to the damn floor.”

“The back room,” Boyd says, not moving his hands from Raylan. He doesn’t want to take the step away. “The table would work.” And Raylan nods, thinking of when he’d last been back there, of Boyd’s smirking face, how sly and clever he was, how strangely beautiful.

Ava slithers off Raylan, smiling still, touching them both fleetingly at the thigh and waist. They shiver, minutely, and follow her.

Three steps into the back, Raylan catches her around the waist, planting his face into her collarbone and sucking hard at the tight skin under her neck. She watches Boyd hear her gasp and moan.

They leave their clothes mostly on, too concerned with getting as close as they can as fast as they can. Raylan makes to push her against the laminate table, but Ava twists around and it’s his ass that gets up on it, followed by her knees as her hands go for his belt.

Everything is quick and heavy, sliding fast this way and that, so much that Raylan can barely keep track. Ava is grinding hard against him, even as she’s working to pull out his cock and he can’t smooth his hands over every corner of her skin fast enough.

Ava is concentrating so much on the intricacies of Raylan’s belt and fly that she’s surprised when Boyd’s sure, strong hands, slide up on her waist, pulling up her skirt, thumb hooking through and stretching her panties aside. She arches her back into his attentions. Raylan pulls himself up to kiss her, heavy and hot with strong strokes of his tongue. She sinks onto his cock. He moans into her mouth.

Boyd has got his own pants down around his knees, his cock hard and coming up on ready. He presses up against Ava’s back, breathing heavy across her neck, skimming her hair up over her shoulder to taste her. She’s salty with sweat and smells of bourbon and heat. She leans up on Raylan, starting to ride him, as his hand shoots out and grasps Boyd’s wrist.

“Fuck, Boyd,” he groans, his eyes wide and about to roll. “Come... get over here. So I can touch you.”

Boyd goes, it’s hard to get close without climbing half up on the table top, but he leans in near to Ava’s side and lays across Raylan, dragged in fast by his insistent grip. His hand scrambles up Boyd’s arm and to his neck, pulling him down for another searing kiss.

They’re moving all together in the rhythm of Ava’s need. As her muscles flex and move, her finger dance across them both and Raylan’s other hand comes across his middle and wraps around Boyd’s cock.

Raylan’s not thinking about how he’s never had his fingers on anyone else’s cock. He’s too busy listening to the sound Boyd makes when he pumps his hand up and down Boyd’s hard shaft. There’s a glisten of pre-come up at the tip and Raylan drags his thumb across it, swirls it around, and Boyd grasps hard at Raylan’s arm, nails digging in.

He says Raylan’s name, like it’s the last word he’ll ever utter. Ava hears that and nearly comes right then and there. She yells, an ecstatic sound that she’s sure neither man has ever heard before, and it rolls out from her throat in a wave as she moves faster and faster, feeling herself spiral up, building to something excruciating, exquisite.

Raylan comes before she does, because Boyd’s lips are at his ear when he says his name again then gasps and comes, because Raylan’s hand has tensed around his cock, moving as fast as Ava is as she cries out once more.

Her pussy tightens as her world does, narrowing just on these two men, on the places where they fit together, on the warmth radiating between them, the sighs and the slow blinking smiles. She rides it out on a cresting wave and collapses onto them, just a pile of relaxed muscles and boneless limbs on hard, unforgiving surfaces.

Boyd gets up first because he’s half standing anyway. It’s easier to find reality when both your feet are on the ground.

His voice is soft when he speaks and even, the only thing that might betray him is the tense muscles in his back and the way he’s looking at Raylan, who’s not looking back at him yet. “This is... something we might want now, Raylan. Perhaps not something we should have, or something we’ll want to keep.”

And when he says this, he really means, perhaps not something Raylan will want to keep. He is, after all, building a hillbilly heroin empire in their backyards.

Ava turns her head to glare at him, wondering that he thinks now is the time for this conversation. Raylan keeps his hands on her waist, holding her against him, but finally looks up at Boyd with eyes just as calm.

“Don’t give me that shit, Boyd,” Raylan says, voice rough. “I can’t take any more of that this week.”

Boyd shakes his head, he doesn’t mean to hurt. He just wants it all on the table. He thinks about the table between them, those few days ago, when all Raylan could see was what Boyd had been before. “Any dance we do now Raylan, subsequent to this, it’s gonna be different. Even if we make the same choices, even if it ends the way you or I would like, it won’t feel the same, right or wrong.”

“Things are already different. You think I’m gonna walk away from this, pretend it never happened?” Raylan sits up, but his hand tightens at Ava’s hip and she weaves her fingers through his, sliding back to accommodate the movement, settle in further on his lap.

Boyd doesn’t think he could get enough of them together, doesn’t want to let this go, but still he says, “Seems to me, it’s easier for you to forget the past, make it fit into your present, than deal with the things you done to people you love.”

He remembers every time Raylan exhumed his embattled past for the sake of an argument, for the ever-important sensation of being the one who is right. Even after he made it clear he knew Boyd didn’t believe more than half the words he’d said, even after all Boyd’s belief and confidence had been scraped off him like mud from someone’s work boot.

Raylan’s expression darkens. “Could say the same about you, Boyd. But I don’t, because this is Harlan and that’s how we live. Are you tryin’ to drive me off?”

”I’m letting you drop it, if you want to. Before things get any more tangled up than they already are. This is gonna have consequences, Raylan, in how you and I--in how we all act from here on out.”

Ava sees that Boyd’s eyes are fierce and worried. He splays his hands helplessly, unhappy at being so misunderstood. Raylan is tense again and his frown is pulled down and small, the way he looks when he’s masking hurt. He always seems to misunderstand.

“If you think I’m gonna cross any lines for you, Boyd--”

“I’m not asking that, dammit. Would you listen to me for once without thinkin’ the worst? That’s all I want, Raylan. Just think about it.”

Raylan blinks at him and feels chastised. Ever since he heard Boyd spouting that KKK drivel at him from inside that rundown church, he had made himself think the worst, too shocked to make excuses and then too betrayed to trust again. Even when Boyd had come to him, shattered from the loss of faith and found family, he’d spared little thought for pity or understanding.

“Trust is hard to come by in these parts,” Raylan finds himself saying.

“It’s a thing, must be earned, Raylan. I know that as well as you do. Let me do that, let this do that,” he motions between them, all three, and Ava risks a smile. “I ain’t sayin’ we should change all our ways. I’m not about askin’ for miracles.”

Ava shifts, pressing her lips to the side of Raylan’s thin-lipped frown, then she looks back at her man. “Let’s just wait and see, boys, okay? No one needs all the answers now.”

 

Later, Raylan will drive back up to Lexington, thoughts a whirl with conflicting instincts, desires, and confusion.

Boyd and Ava will clean the bar.


End file.
